Chinatown Kid

Frisco Fu Fighters

Chinatown Kid
aka Tang ren jie xiao zi
Hong Kong 1977
Directed by Cheh Chang
Shaw Brothers/Celestial Pictures
Arrow Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Spoilers in this one.

Chinatown Kid is the eighth of the films presented in Volume One of Arrow Films ShawScope Blu Ray boxed edition and, like all but a couple of the films included in this box, it’s a first time watch from me. There are two very tonally different versions of the film presented here, the slightly happier ending 90 minute version and the darker, more shades of gray original cut, lasting almost two hours and with a much less optimistic ending (if either ending could said to be optimistic).

The film follows two characters, the primary being main lead Sheng Fu as Tan Tung. Now, I’ve seen Sheng Fu in a number of films in this set and I’ve quite warmed to his mischievous on screen personality and Beatles style mop top... so I was sad to learn, in one of the extras presented here that, at the height of his career and happily married to singing sensation Jenny (who also co-stars in Chinatown Kid), he died in a car crash at the age of 28, in the same period as he was filming The 8 Diagram Pole Fighter... a film I’ve not seen as yet but, when I watch it, if I notice his character suddenly dropping out of the narrative, well, at least I now know the reason why.

This film follows him getting in trouble in Hong Kong by basically helping somebody out and then having to exit the country hastily, after he is framed for drug possession and the police are after him. He flees Hong Kong, heading for a destination that we also see his co-star Chien Sun as Yang Chien-wen also go to.  Yang comes from a completely different class background, having won a scholarship to study abroad. So they both pitch up in San Francisco, where cinema marquees for such famous pornographic films as Deep Throat and The Devil In Miss Jones act as a perfect time capsule of the era.

The two co-stars meet and get illegal immigrant jobs in a restaurant but when Tan, who is very much the focus of the film, keeps getting into trouble defending people using his Kung Fu skills... he eventually finds himself out of work and out on the streets. However, the combination of his blind naivete and wanting to help people out means he’s suddenly working for one of the king pin bosses of Chinatown, going from rags to extreme riches in a matter of weeks. However, when he finds out his boss is actively involved in drug dealing, he then sets out to destroy that trade. It’s lots of ‘to’ing and ‘fro’ing through a moral minefield as Tan constantly strives to do the right thing and is constantly getting himself into more trouble every time he falls into the trap of helping people. Indeed, as the movie goes on, various people who he’s helped, then reject his friendship and he even finds himself at odds with Yang after a while.

The film has it’s fair share of fight scenes where Sheng Fu gets to show off his formidable martial arts skills, facing off against some opponents who seem to be almost as good as him. Occasionally, like in the big fight at the end of the picture, he fights side by side with Chien Sun, when Chien’s character finally understands just how Tan has been secretly helping him... by funding his studies with his fat cat gangster money.

And it’s an interesting film regarding the morality of the characters portrayed. In terms of the various gangland factions throughout the movie, there are no good guys. Everyone is either the ‘bad guy’ or the ‘not quite as bad guy’ but, of course, by the end of the film, even the slightly less sinister gang turns out to be just another bunch of ruthless criminals. The only real innocents in the movie are the two male leads... Tan due to his ignorance, naivete and loyalty to people and Yang, out of a sense of wanting to keep up with his studies (which leads him to drugs to stay awake to study after a long shift at work). And, as I said, it’s a nice time capsule movie too... I mean, how many films are there where the corrupted, innocent hero gets involved with the wrong people due to his desire to own a digital watch? Indeed, it’s a sign of the times and also a nice comment on the character that, when he is dying from his wound in the final scene (he’s just arrested in the shorter version), he tries to give Yang his digital watch as an ultimate symbol of their friendship.

And that’s me done on Chinatown Kid. It’s refreshing to see a Kung Fu filled Shaw Brothers movie actually set in times contemporary to when it was made. I mean, okay, The Mighty Peking Man (reviewed here) was, for sure but... yeah... that wasn’t a martial arts movie. I can see how pictures like this might have influenced the next generation of film directors and certainly, for instance, John Woo... who was an assistant director at Shaw Brothers in the late 1960s. So yeah, a funky score (excluding the terrible title song at the start, which Tan is forever quoting the lyrics from throughout the movie) of needle dropped cues from the De Wolf library, a chunk of which are included on one of the two accompanying soundtrack albums in Arrows mighty ShawScope Volume One box set and, even a dagger disguised as a belt buckle... make this a lively and fun watch. Worth a look.

The Boxer From Shantung

Everybody Was
Shantung Fight Win

The Boxer
From Shantung
aka Ma Yong Zhen
Hong Kong 1972
Directed by Cheh Chang & Hsueh-Li Pao
Shaw Brothers/Celestial Pictures
Arrow Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Spoilers aplenty.

Another Shaw Production then... as the end credits often said.

The Boxer From Shantung is another blistering classic which I’ve not seen before but, it’s a pretty good slice of action mayhem, it has to be said. Kuan Tai Chen, in his acting debut, plays real life character Ma Yongzhen... a person who has been portrayed a lot of times in various movies (some of which I’ll someday get to see, I’m sure)... although I understand the story is only very loosely based on him, which probably differs from production to production.

In this one, Ma is a drifter who has left Shantung with his brother (or possibly best friend, depends what they mean by ‘brother’ in these kinds of movies) to try and find gainful employment in Shanghai, only to be living the life of a tramp, struggling to find what work he can. He does, however, have practically unbeatable Kung Fu skills which he’s somehow managed to acquire over the years (notice I didn’t mention anything about boxing skills again... I don’t want to harp on about it but this is yet another Shaw Brothers movie that mentions a boxer without actually having one... I’m guessing the concept of a boxer is completely different in Hong Kong).

During the course of the first 20 minutes or so, Ma manages to demonstrate his kung fu skills when he has an altercation with one of the local gang bosses and, when he comes to blows with said boss, the two come out of it having won a mutual respect for each other. However, Ma takes no rewards for any of the favours he does for people (including becoming embroiled in a fight at a local tea house where he meets a woman who takes his romantic interest, sadly unfulfilled due to the strange arc the story takes) and just wants to make his own way... for a little while at least. Once again my Western thinking brain may be the problem here but the story now goes in a completely different direction to that which I thought it would take. That being said, it certainly reminds me of the kind of bleak, ‘crime sometimes pays up until a point’ US gangster movies of the 1930s starring the likes of Jimmy Cagney and Humphrey Bogart, to be sure.

After a while, following a big ‘knock him down and win twenty dollars’ fight with a massive Italian fighter (which took 5 days to shoot), he doesn’t turn down the reward of owning a small part of the local territory... nor the protection racket money it brings in. It isn’t long before he’s well on his way up as a local gangster but, as is evidenced by his method, he doesn’t let his men beat anyone up for money as he remembers what it’s like to be poor so... yeah... he’s kind of the good guy gangster. However, a much worse mobster is trying to take over all of Shanghai and when he kills the other gangster that Ma looked up to at the start of the movie, things get real. And when I say real, I mean far from real but very athletic with bloody kung fu fighting featuring bashing fists, harbinger hatchets of bloody carnage and slicing, wooshy daggers that make the foley a joy to listen to.

It’s nicely shot too, including some nice colour palettes which shift to different tonal variations and some interesting camerawork, some of which uses a movement, followed by a zoom in on a detail... followed by a movement off from that zoomed location to go pick up another highlight of a scene. It’s edited in a way that it all makes sense and there’s some nice close ups of twitchy, angried up faces held for long periods as anti-heroes and villains trade scowls and work their facial muscles due to, I suspect, somebody watching far too many Leone movies.

Then there’s the final showdown in a tea house which took another ten days to shoot (out of a gruelling 30 day schedule where one director shot day scenes and the other the night scenes). The fight starts off with Ma, who hasn’t got a scratch on him in any fight preceeding this one, immediately taking an axe to his guts, which he leaves in there for half the fight (which takes up most of the last half an hour of the film... which Arrow and Celestial Pictures between them have thankfully made available in its original two and a quarter hour length cut). And yes, he still manages to take on 50 or more combatants and kill them all before perishing himself, after doing his best Samson and Delilah impression and literally smashing through a column to bring the floor above him down, levelling up the playing field to give him access to the last in a long, hierarchical chain of increasingly important villains.

And it’s quite obvious Tarantino must have watched this film quite a bit because, yeah, it’s very similar in both style and impact to his infamous House Of Blue Leaves sequence from the end of Kill Bill Volume One. That being said, compared to the fighting scenes in the eight Taiwanese Kung Fu movies in the Eureka Masters Of Cinema Cinematic Vengeance boxed set I watched earlier last year, the fights I’m seeing in the Shaw Brothers movies, while immaculately edited and sporting high production values... do seem a bit low energy and slower paced to the ones I’ve seen in the Joseph Kuo movies.

However, the fights in this one are still quite brutal bloody ballets of kinetic energy and are more than entertaining for what they are. The Boxer From Shantung is an absolutely brilliant chop socky movie which was extremely successful (there were a fair few bootleg sequels knocked out by other companies very quickly, by the sounds of it) and certainly influential. I really enjoyed this one and am looking forward to exploring some more films from the excellent ShawScope Volume One box set from Arrow soon. This is good stuff.